Archive for the ‘music’ Category

Jared Ficklin in this blog article states : ” Making sound visible is a hobby of mine. After years pursuing real-time sound visualization, I became intrigued by the idea of eliminating time and allowing listeners to take in an entire song as a single visual impression. The result reveals an unseen beauty. “

Mathemusician Vi Hart Explains Space-Time with a Music Box and a Möbius Strip

by Maria Popova

“The fabric of the universe via backwards Bach.

If mathemusician Vi Hart — who for the past three years has been bringing whimsy to math with her mind-bending, playful, and illuminating stop-motion musical doodles — isn’t already your hero, she should be, and likely will be. (Cue in the GRAMMYs newly announced search for great music teachers.) In her latest gem, Hart uses music notation, a Möbius strip, and backwards Bach to explain space-time:

Music has two recognizable dimensions — one is time, and the other is pitch-space. … There [are] a few things to notice about written music: Firstly, that it is not music — you can’t listen to this. … It’s not music — it’s music notation, and you can only interpret it into the beautiful music it represents.

Also see Hart on the science of sound, frequency and pitch, and her blend of Victorian literature and higher mathematics to explain multiple dimensions.

For a decidedly less whimsical but enormously illuminating deeper dive, see these 7 essential books on time and watch Michio Kaku’s BBC documentary on the subject, then learn how to listen to music.”

AN : Just as the author , Maria Popova , writes of mathemusician Vi Hart : “If mathemusician Vi Hart — ….- isn’t already your hero, she should be, and likely will . “….so you would be enamoured with the effervesent writings and curations of Maria through her site “BrainPickings.com ” . Absolutely a gem of ideas, innovation and thought leadership !

“It sometimes seems as though the world of classical music doesn’t change. Most of the music is from a canon that may be hundreds of years old; most of the time the musicians are still formally clad, the men in the evening dress of a century ago.

In one important area, however, new ways of doing things are starting to appear. Technology is changing the ways in which musicians rehearse and perform.

Pianist Kirill Gerstein sparked intermission discussions late last year when he performed Thomas Adès concerto “Seven Days” with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra using an iPad with a wireless foot pedal in lieu of a conventional score.

In an interview, Gerstein said he’s been using his iPad for 2½ years, the first, he thinks, among classical pianists. He uses it with contemporary music, where memorization is not expected, and in chamber music.

The tablet has practical advantages: It is lit, making reading it easier and eliminating concerns about lighting. It also eliminates the need for page turners. “They may turn the page too soon or too late, or make noise,” Gerstein said. “In cases like this, it is helpful to play with the iPad. I know exactly when I want to turn, and I turn it for myself.” His system has never crashed.

To do the turning, Gerstein uses a Bluetooth-enabled foot pedal called an AirTurn. He gets new scores from their publishers, or makes PDFs of older music by scanning scores from his own library.

In the case of out-of-copyright works, he recommends IMSLP.org. The International Music Score Library Project is community-sourced, like Wikipedia, and Gerstein calls it “an amazing resource.”

The site is copyright compliant, so there’s nothing from after 1923, and it’s free. “There are the most imaginable and unimaginable things,” Gerstein said. “Maybe you won’t find the edition of the Franck sonata from 1980, but you will find the original (edition) and four others. Things that used to be difficult to find are up there.”

Otherwise, Gerstein works from paper versions. “I do think it’s very important to keep buying paper versions of sheet music. We do want publishers of accurate versions around.”

With the iPad, he can tweak his scores by combining the piano part and a full orchestra score to give himself important cues. Sometimes he plays from the full score. By eliminating the white space of the margins, the notes become almost as large as in the printed score.

“Then, of course, there is the fact that I can carry a music library,” added Gerstein. “I can look at (scores) while traveling. It’s not possible with paper, just from the luggage side. Today, I decided to read the Franck sonata; it took a minute to download the score, and then I was happily playing it.”

St. Louis Symphony Orchestra section cello Bjorn Ranheim admires Gerstein’s score-on-tablet setup and wishes the SLSO could have the same.

Like this:

“According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the music service that Google is close to launching will include sharing features via integration with its Google+ platform, which isn’t that surprising, since Google has said the new social network will be part of everything it does. For Apple, however, the new social features in Google’s offering will reinforce what Spotify and other music services have already made obvious: Apple and iTunes are falling behind in the social-music race, which could have significant consequences for the company as the music industry continues to evolve.

By any measure, iTunes is still the 800-pound gorilla of the digital-music industry: More than 10 billion songs have been downloaded since Apple launched the service in 2001, and some record labels and music publishers now get a huge proportion of the revenue they make on their artists from iTunes. By launching the service—along with the iPod, which turned 10 years old on the weekend—Apple effectively reengineered the entire music industry, persuading the major labels to use it as a conduit to reach music lovers who were busy downloading whatever they could get their hands on.

Obviously, that kind of power means iTunes isn’t going away soon, and it will continue to be the main choice for record companies that want to monetize an artist. But the music business is changing—along with virtually every other form of media and content—as a result of the increasingly social nature of the Web. And in that particular race, services such as Spotify are winning, in part because of their integration with networks like Facebook and their focus on streaming over buying.”

Like this:

…”As social animals, we want to discover and share music, and external forces are working in concert to unbundle all types of media. These forces helped produce services like Grooveshark and Rdio, new incarnations of the Rhapsody subscription model, where users pay monthly fees to access catalogs and additional fees to carry that music with them. In parallel, services like Shazam and SoundHound help us identify music we hear, and Instant.fm, Last.fm, and 8tracks help us create new playlists and keep track of what we listen to over time.

In 2011, these primal urges have roared to life, producing a flurry of services aimed at helping us discover, share, and network around music experiences. A few have built on the “following/follower” model, such as SoundCloud, which allows users to capture and share a variety of sounds (not limited to music), and SoundTracking, which allows users to broadcast the songs they’re currently listening to. A new service, Rexly, adds a recommendation layer on top of iTunes accounts, built on the intuition that we don’t discover music we like via the wisdom of the crowd, but rather through a small group of influential friends we admire. All of these companies are interesting in the sense that they create a dedicated channel for us to discover, share, and build relationships around music online.

Then there’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room: Facebook. The current rumor is that the largest social network will shortly launch a new offering integrated with Spotify that gives users access to a massive song catalog, with the added sweetener that Facebook already has captured information around what musicians we “like,” giving it an opportunity to provide targeted add-on services alongside our favorite tracks. With Sean Parker advising Spotify, it seems as if his presence alone will make this happen on a massive scale.”